Tongans will soon benefit from improved digital access to key public services, including significant upgrades to Tonga’s civil registration and national ID systems, following the approval of a US$4.65 million grant by the World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors. The Tonga Digital Government Support Project will strengthen digital access, efficiency and security in Tonga’s public service, by supporting a number of whole-of-government digital initiatives, including a new National Government Portal that will improve Tongans’ access to services and information across all Government ministries and agencies, as well as improvements to Tonga’s regulations for digital economy and digital government, data protection and privacy, and cyber security. In addition, the project will improve Tonga’s civil registration and national ID systems, ensuring that each Tongan citizen and resident is assigned a unique ID number at birth, that their legal identity can be authenticated for accessing services in-person and online, and that birth, death and marriage records are linked. For Tongan families, this will mean that newborns can be registered more quickly, and that all Tongans will have better access to education, health, employment, elections, immigration, property ownership and banking. These efforts will accelerate achievement of Sustainable Development Goal target (SDG) 16.9: to “provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.”

Through resolution 73/1, ESCAP member States decided that in the years when the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development meets under the auspices of the General Assembly at the summit level, which is every four years, the Commission and the Asia-Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development (APFSD) would share the same theme [as the High-level Political Forum]. In 2019, the first time this convergence takes place, the theme study for the Commission session will, therefore, focus on the theme for the High-level Political Forum for 2019: Empowering people and ensuring inclusiveness and equality. The theme study for the seventy-fourth session in 2018, entitled Inequality in the era of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development set the stage, showing that the region's high inequality of outcomes and opportunities traps the vulnerable in poverty and marginalization. The 2019 theme study builds on these findings to examine how empowerment and inclusion are critical for reducing inequality. In recognition of civil registration's role in addressing inequality, ESCAP's CRVS team and the Government of Pakistan co-hosted a side-event at the 75th session of the Commission to highlight the need for improved CRVS systems in meeting the 2030 Agenda. With a closing speech from the Executive Secretary for ESCAP, the panel speakers included the Ambassador of Pakistan to Thailand and Permanent Representative to ESCAP, the Chief Advisor to the Ministry of Planning, Development and Reforms in Pakistan, the Chief Statistician of Malaysia, the Permanent Representative of China to ESCAP, the Regional Advisor for Child Protection, UNICEF ROSA, and the Director of ESCAP’s Statistics Division. The speakers addressed topics such as country specific, CRVS system developments, the human rights inherent in legal identity, how CRVS facilitates better access to social services, as well as the regional progress toward meeting the Regional Action Framework and the upcoming 2020 Ministerial Conference. Follow the links to hear directly from Dato' Sri Mohd Uzir Mahadin, the Chief Statistician of Malaysia, or Dr. Syed Mursalin, the Chief Advisor to the Ministry of Planning, Development and Reforms in Pakistan on the continued importance of CRVS.

CRVSNOW, the first commercially available cloud-based Civil Registration and Vital Statistics System with the largest installed base in the world, is being offered for free to low income countries. Object Consulting recently implemented CRVS Solutions’ system, called CRVSNOW, in Victoria, Australia for 6.3M citizens.  With this most recent success, CRVSNOW manages the life events for 14M citizens, handles 16,500 users, 123M vital records and prints 880,000 certificates a year. CRVSNOW is the most modern full-function commercially available cloud-based CRVS system in the world. CRVS Solutions is now offering the latest release of CRVSNOW free to low income countries to support the modernization of their CRVS systems. CRVS Solutions’ offer includes a free test system and no mandatory support fees so interested countries can evaluate CRVSNOW online at no cost. “Modern electronic systems that can link civil registration with civil identification system, particularly while assigning unique identification numbers to individuals at birth and with other information systems, can be a key factor in improving the access of these individuals to critical public services such as education, health, social welfare, and financial services,” said Dr. Samuel Mills who leads the implementation of the World Bank Group (WBG) 2016–2030 Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) Action Plan and the delivery of the state-of-the-art, comprehensive CRVS eLearning course. Mills negotiated with CRVS Solutions to make CRVSNOW available to interested low-income countries for free. However, Mills emphasized that the WBG does not endorse specific vendor products; WBG encourages countries to assess several products to make informed decisions on the best overall value for money while considering quality, cost, and other factors as needed. CRVSNOW has three main modules: 1) Core for staff and registry operations; 2) eRegistry – user interface and web service interfaces for hospitals, funeral directors, marriage celebrants and other stakeholders; and 3) ePublic – for all citizens to access the services of the registry e.g., parents registering the birth of a child. All modules are free for Low Income Countries. Several countries are implementing a social registry for social safety net programs. A Social Registry is key to implementing social programs and enabling the delivery of successful outcomes consolidates the outreach, registration and assessment of needs and conditions of populations likely to be targeted by social programs. CRVSNOW is a platform to support any registry including a Social Registry. “CRVSNOW is now proven in the two largest states of Australia with over 14M citizens. As part of our corporate social responsibility policy, we are very pleased to offer CRVSNOW to UN designated Low Income Countries for free to help them improve registration of vital events and contribute to furthering the UN’s SDG’s. Our team is experienced and ready to assist Low Income Countries to adopt CRVSNOW.” said Graham Jones, Group Business Development Manager for CRVS Solutions. CRVSNOW can be customized to suit local context. The user interfaces for the system use RESTful APIs to communicate with the application servers. The user interfaces are written in Angular which is very flexible about formatting and style which allows a considerable degree of control, but CRVS Solutions can provide the source code for specific forms to allow countries to make their own version. Countries can integrate their own user interfaces into the API if desired. CRVSNOW has an offline feature called the Field System.  The Field System is a complete CRVSNOW system on a laptop. It is designed to be taken into the field where there are no network connections such as remote villages or islands. Because it is a complete system and it contains the registry (encrypted and with additional security), registry operations such as entering notifications, producing certificates and searching the registry can be conducted in the field with no Internet connection. Any notifications that are entered are saved in a “draft” list and then later submitted to the core when the Field System is reconnected to the network. Jones added, “Whilst CRVSNOW was built for the high end needs of a high-income country, every country can use these features to improve data quality, make registration more accessible to every citizen and gain the cost benefits of cloud computing. Low income countries can start off using the core functions and then later use the high-end features without incurring any additional license costs.” Further details, videos and downloads are available through the website at crvsnow.com.

The Technical Support Unit-CRVS, Ministry of Planning, Development and Reform (M/o PDR) has been pursuing the agenda of CRVS strengthening in Pakistan. To determine the baselines, both rapid and comprehensive assessments were organized and strengths and weaknesses of existing system were documented. During this process, immediate work on the CRVS legal framework was identified as an important thematic area for the improvement of CRVS and formulation of CRVS National Strategic Plan. Towards this end, an in depth study was conducted by the Technical Support Unit-CRVS to review current legislation for CRVS in detail both at National and Provincial levels and also to look for at the feasibility of enacting CRVS Universal law. This study focused upon the review of pre-independence and post-independence CRVS related laws, concentrating on the legislation for registration of births, deaths, marriages and divorces. Strengths and weaknesses of the legislation were highlighted. This study revealed multiple issues pertaining to legislation including; contradictory and outdated legislation, poor enforcement and understanding, inconsistent legislation application, complexity related to payments, lack of clear definitions and clarity regarding roles and responsibilities among provinces. All these factors were recognized as a strong barrier to CRVS system strengthening and called for an extensive improvement of current legislation, development and adoption of a national uniform CRVS law to replace currently fragmented, piecemeal laws. The findings of the legislation review were disseminated during a consultative meeting held on March 04, 2019 at TSU PPMI Complex, Islamabad. Recommendations/suggestions were discussed in detail. The meeting was participated by National Database & Registration Authority (NADRA), Local Government and Rural Development Department, Federal and Provincial ministries and departments of planning and development, health, law and justice and development partners. One of the distinct outcomes of the consultation was to initiate the formulation of a policy framework for comprehensive CRVS legislation. Additional evidence and directions would be sought using some innovative CRVS Legislation framework tools being used in other situations. Technical Support Unit (TSU) has already devised a roadmap for the coming months to achieve this goal.